The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

Funeral In Chico

The sun is red this morning
and the smoke hangs heavy in the sky.
The grasslands are burning
and there is nothing to do, but inhale.
My hands and feet are swollen
and the stiffness makes me wonder
is this what it feels like to die, and dry up,
then burn in blue flame and be no more?

The day of the funeral we pack boxes of mementos:
high school yearbook, Navy flags, work overalls-
and carry the things that wont fit- a rod iron bench
lifted from the front yard- and try to reconstruct the story
of a dead man from the hallow remnants.
All day I sweat in my red dress,
perspiration rings my underarms like ripe melons
and the heavy curtain of fabric sticks to my thighs
when I stand and approach the podium.
The microphone is adjusted and readjusted
and all the flat words sound like they come from another mouth.

Do you know the cost of dying?
More than marriage or birth.
Fifty sleepless nights and thousands spent
to eulogize the dead to death.
I cringe at half truths about suffering and salvation
and barely force myself to exchange
pleasantries with the strangers of family.
Even when it's over
it's not over.
All day and night the telephone rings
and the stream of visitors beat against the front door.
I want to crawl into a borrowed grave
and ask for borrowed peace.

I lay in the backroom, under the ceiling fan and listen
to the meaningless ebb and flow of sounds from a distant world.
Sweat soaks through my underwear as I stare,
glassy eyed at the world

Outside
hummingbirds dip their delicate beaks
into the nose of blooming flowers,
ripe figs are ready to explode, their purple skin
pulled taught over sweet pink flesh,
and the fertile ground, which so easily yields up
sun ripened tomatoes and sweet basil,
is ready to give itself over and over,
without apology, to the cycle of things.
I wish, more than anything, to forsake
taxing human contrivances,
to rise and fall like the hummingbird,
to be as beautiful and fully consumed
as the grass that was
and is no more.

Finally, I understand, if nothing else,
that all nature desperately years for consolation.
Even these lines are part of the striving.
There is no right way to be helpless
or to try to understand what it all means:
a funeral in Chico, California,
the red sun in the sky,
figs and hummingbirds,
a poem I do not know how to end.

If I Was To Write

If I was to write a poem
I wouldn't start here
or now or ever
because I don't know how
to feel my way through
all the unspeakable territory that is
too near and too far
too dangerous to feel in my mouth
and hear in my ears.

If I was to write a poem
I would feign ignorance, I would
tear it up, burn it
in blue flame
and scatter each hanging letter on the air
kiss the memory into oblivion
and refuse to believe there is any way
to immortality.

If I was to write a poem
I wouldn't start
because I couldn't possibly find
an end.

Poem of Undoing- by Sharon Venezio

How many kinds of undoing are there?
The word love in the back of my throat,
mouth ajar, as I don't say your name.

Is unhappiness a kind of undoing?
The heart's fault line, a fracture
in the space between two bodies.

My heart is a thirsty artichoke,
each petal a different version of undoing.

If I knock three times, will you reappear?

This is the Fall

this is the fall
day that smells like first
year college
chloroplast green
billowing skirt reading
poetry on the well
manicured green lawns
frisky squirrels act
out the part of bright
students and buoyant
fresh love

Mama Says, Thresh the Laundry

Mama says, thresh the laundry on the line
It’s time to mulch the garden with bathrobes and slippers
Put on your shower cap and hoe with your sisters under the blue moonlight
Watch the men irrigate the accordion and weed the violin
Drink and clap and sing!

We slaughter the ironing board every spring
and sell bent nails each winter
We sow the curtain rod, harvest the lampshade, groom the fly
If only you could bundle and weigh our weary joy!

But when I go, because I will go-
I will plow under the marigolds in my heart
I will carry the big leaf maple- even through the gutters
of the fine city- I will carry its dirty roots and all its shade-
deep in my blue jean pockets

Cranky Pants

Today I have my cranky pants on
pulled up high
so that I ooze irritability
out the seams.
I’m cranky about my bumpy bus commute
that reeks of stale beer, cranky about unpaid overtime,
cranky about the cell phone dropped in water,
and the headband that pinches.
Cranky without a caffeine and sugar fix,
cranky because I am so behind on piles of paperwork
bills, dental appointments, and car repairs.
Cranky because I’ve gained fifteen pounds
and can’t even fit into
my cranky pants.